Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir, a 12-year-old boy fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer, speaks during a news conference on Dec. 8, 2014, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

(Newser)
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The mother of a 12-year-old boy shot dead while brandishing a toy gun wants authorities to skip the grand jury. At a press conference in Cleveland, the attorney for Samaria Rice urged prosecutors to avoid a grand jury trial and directly charge the officer who shot Rice's son Tamir in a park last month, NBC News reports. "There is nothing written anywhere in the law that says police officers are to be treated differently than any other citizen," says Benjamin Crump, who has also worked on the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin cases. Crump's plea comes after nationwide protests derided grand juries that declined to charge white police officers who had killed Brown and Eric Garner, both of whom were black and unarmed.

Rice says her tragedy began when two boys knocked on her door Nov. 22 saying an officer had shot Tamir twice in the stomach, ABC News reports. She ran to the park where Tamir lay on the ground, unattended by police, and saw her 14-year-old daughter in the back of a squad car (the daughter later said police had tackled and handcuffed her, Samaria adds). "I knew she was crying for me, but I couldn’t see her hands," says Samaria. She asked police what had happened but was only told to "calm down." Forced to choose between being with her older daughter and younger son, Samaria "of course ... [went] with the 12-year-old." Officers made her "sit in the front of the ambulance truck like I was a passenger" on the ride to the hospital, she says, where Tamir died the next day.

Whilst Video Games & other violent media, may well have had a bearing on the fact that this child, was permitted to not only have an imitation revolver, but to have one that had had the sticker clearly denoting it to be an imitation REMOVED. I lay the Majority of the blame squarely on his parents whom gave him this imitation weapon, then clearly failed to instruct him, as to where & how he could play with it. If anyone is to be brought before a Court & charged with his death, it should be the Parents. Let this incident be a lesson to all parents, IF you give your child an imitation Revolver, ensure it has a label on the side of it clearly showing it to be imitation, then tell the child to never take it out of the garden of the house.